Sometimes it’s a lack of words…other times a too busy season…maybe just a season of life…

Then there are the silent times when you have all of the words but you can’t use them because to speak them…write them…is to admit….to share…to expose…what happened in the silence.

Sometimes weeks…months even, go by, and the silence, at first haunting, becomes a welcome reprieve and what began as a short break turns into a crutch that you lean on to avoid admitting….sharing…exposing…

Breaking the silence after so long leaves you at a loss of what to share – even how to share – where to start – what is important anyway?

Wondering where your story ends and another person’s story begins – trying to decide how to be true to your story when so much of theirs in tangled up in yours – and so maybe not even yours to tell.

Trying to break the silence sometimes makes the silence longer.

When I first started writing, it was to share my story so that someone…just one even…would know they are not alone….as I had felt so alone…

How do you pick it back up when you’ve hidden yourself away for so long. When so much has happened and it doesn’t make sense to write in any kind of chronological order because your heart is so burdened by the now and the most recent past….but everything that happened in the silence has led up to this moment.

If I could show you my tears…what I have wept over…if you could just read my heart…

The words, when spoken outside of my heart, often seem cold and distant.

You can’t see my tears so maybe you can’t see everything that is hidden in the silence.

I’ve written a silence breaking post in my head a thousand times over.

Every time, it starts by asking forgiveness…grace…because I know once I share these months of silence, so much will be disjointed and jumbled and possibly incoherent to anyone outside of my heart.

So where do I start?

By sharing my heart with you? It’s shattered and trying to heal and find…peace in this new place. I started to say joy…hope…but if I’m nothing else in this space, I am transparent and peace is what I am searching for today.

I think I’ve almost found it and then…the moment fades and it almost feels like my search has begun all over again and any progress I had made is lost.

Then I think…I could just share the events of the last few months…tell you how we got to this particular point in time…start with the outer edges of the puzzle and slowly fill in the inner pieces…

Neither of these ways seem to bring words to my fingers…both ways seem to encourage more silence…

The only way I’ve been able to tell about the last year has been in cold facts…facts which do not tell any of the story of my heart. Facts that only build taller fences around my heart…a heart which is so hesitant to open itself up to any more breaks…

A heart which has cracked in so many places and left whole pieces of it somewhere so far away I can’t seem to find them to put them back in place.

So this is my start. I won’t ask for your forgiveness or patience or grace….instead I will assume all of those things….an assumption I made long ago before ever sharing my heart.

Breaking the silence may bring more silence….it may bring more words than I know what to do with…it may bring a mixture of both…hopefully it also leads me to find the peace that has been just out of reach for what seems like the longest time…

This journey of silence has been a long one…formed out of a broken – and often still breaking – heart.

Perhaps breaking the silence will begin the journey of recovering the pieces of my broken heart.